Near field communication (NFC) is a set of standards for smartphones and similar devices utilized to establish radio communication between two devices by touching them together or bringing them into proximity, typically at a distance of 10 cm or less.
NFC uses electromagnetic induction between two loop antennas located within each other's near field, effectively forming an air-core transformer. It operates within globally available and unlicensed radio frequency bands, and at rates ranging from 106 kbit/s to 424 kbit/s. NFC involves an initiator and a target; the initiator actively generates an RF field that can power a passive target, an unpowered chip called a “tag”. This enables NFC targets to take simple form factors such as stickers, key fobs, or cards that do not use batteries.
NFC tags store data (typically between 96 and 4,096 bytes) and may be read-only, but may alternatively be rewriteable. The tags can securely store personal data such as debit and credit card information, loyalty program data, personal identification numbers, and networking contacts, among other information. They can be custom-encoded by their manufacturers or use the specifications provided by the NFC Forum, an industry association.
In addition to communication between a powered NFC device and an unpowered NFC device, NFC peer-to-peer communication is possible, provided both devices are powered. This may be utilized for peer-to-peer data transfers, for example. In addition, an active NFC device may emulate an NFC card in what is called a card emulation mode.
When the receiving NFC device receives the data, it then routes the data to an appropriate destination within the NFC device, such as a non-volatile memory, or any component attached to the NFC device that can handle the received data. In order to properly route the data, the NFC device reads routing information from the data, or attributes of the data e.g., the protocol used to transport the data (for example: ISO14443 a.k.a. ISO-DEP, or NFC-DEP, etc.) or the NFC-RF technology used to transport the data over the air (e.g., RF Type A or RF Type B, etc.), that indicates what type of routing is to be used, then attempts to correlate the routing information with a routing address in a look-up table.
However, sometimes there is either not a routing address in the look-up table that is associated with the routing information, or the routing information itself is lacking. To address these situations, further development in the area of NFC data routing is desired.